stabilityai / stable-audio-3-small-sfx

## Overview Stable Audio 3 Small SFX is a text-to-audio model by Stability AI. It uses latent diffusion to denoise audio in a compressed latent space. A semantic-acoustic autoencoder then decodes those latents into a stereo waveform. It’s built for sound effects, so you can design foley, hits, and ambiences from text. ## What you can build - Foley packs for games, film, and animation (footsteps, cloth, impacts) - UI and product sounds (clicks, toggles, alerts, success tones) - Ambient beds (room tone, wind, rain, traffic, crowd wash) - Cinematic transitions (risers, whooshes, drops, booms) - Rapid prototypes for storyboards, animatics, and gameplay mockups ## Inputs - A written description of the sound you want, as plain English text. - A target clip length in seconds. This model supports 1 to 120 seconds. - An optional “prompt expansion” switch. It can rewrite short prompts into longer ones. - A sampling-steps control. More steps can add detail, but changes taper off. - A guidance strength control. Higher values can push closer to the prompt. ## Outputs The model returns one generated audio clip as a downloadable file. The response also includes the final prompt used and a numeric seed for that output. Under the hood, Stable Audio 3 generates 44.1 kHz stereo audio. Some deployments deliver the result as a compressed file, such as MP3. ## Recommended settings - Use 3 to 15 seconds for most one-shot SFX like hits, clicks, and whooshes. - Use 15 to 60 seconds for ambiences and looping beds. - Keep sampling steps low for iteration. The distilled checkpoints look strong at 8 steps. - Turn prompt expansion on when your prompt is short or missing key details. - Start guidance strength near 1. Raise it only when prompt adherence is weak. ## Limitations - It’s not designed for speech or voice generation. - Prompts in languages other than English can perform worse. - Maximum clip length is 120 seconds per generation. - Highly detailed prompts can still produce artifacts like warble or smeared transients. - Very dynamic mixes may need post work (trim, fade, normalize, and EQ). - Vague prompts can produce generic textures instead of clear, named events. - Low-quality or noisy source audio can hurt results when you use editing workflows. ## Safety & compliance - Follow the Stability AI Community License terms for this model. - The pipeline uses a T5Gemma text component, which has its own use restrictions. - Don’t generate content that violates laws, platform rules, or rights you don’t own. - Treat outputs as generated media. Review them before publishing or shipping. - Some deployments include an audio safety checker. It may block certain prompts.